Robert Carradine’s passing at 71 closes the chapter on a life that glowed even as it quietly fractured. As a member of the famed Carradine dynasty, he could have lived in the shadows of others, yet he built something distinctly his own: the scrappy charm of The Cowboys, the cult electricity of Revenge of the Nerds, the gentle, anchoring warmth of Lizzie McGuire’s dad. To audiences, he was the safe place in the story, the steady heart you trusted without thinking.

His family now reveals that behind that steady heart was a mind weathering the relentless storms of bipolar disorder for two decades. By naming it, they refuse to let his struggle be rewritten as mere “tragedy” or gossip. Their grief has become a call to action: to treat mental illness as seriously as any visible wound, to ask better questions, to listen past “I’m fine,” and to understand that even the kindest, funniest person in the room may be holding on by a thread. In honoring Robert Carradine, they’re asking us not just to remember him, but to protect the living by seeing what we’ve spent too long looking away from.